Broadcast over two nights in November of
1990, featuring almost 100 minutes of Emmy Award-winning music, Stephen King’s “It” finally
makes a world premiere soundtrack appearance on this 2-CD set, intact and complete.

Richard Bellis anchors his score not with a single theme, but two primary ideas. One dominates
but the other takes front and center in key situations. The first theme is a melancholy line
heard in the first track (“Main Title”), played in full by solo trumpet over strings in the minor and
quoted in part throughout the score. The second theme identifies the circus environment and
plays in the major, appearing judiciously in the score but actually becoming the memorable
“End Credits” music. In between is an abundance of ideas
that range from warmly nostalgic to brightly heroic, from
gently sinister to intensely frightening. Yet no matter where
the score goes, those two principal ideas always stay close
at hand, lending the entire score a cohesiveness not always
found in such lengthy scoring assignments.

As is typical with television scoring, there are numerous
cues that play for mere seconds, sometimes to usher in
a commercial break, sometimes to bridge one scene into
another. In fact, some 80 cues were written and recorded,
a significant number by any standard. But atypically, nearly
all are used as they were originally intended in the film.

For this release of the score, Intrada had access to the
composer’s own live two-track stereo session mixes made directly onto DATs, recorded by Avi
Kipper at Universal Studios’ scoring stage. Though the studio is somewhat small, Kipper managed
to get a strong, crisp recording with the orchestra and synth sessions, enhancing the room
size with a slight amount of stereo reverb at the time. For our release, we have retained the
ambience of the sessions and have not applied any additional processing with the solitary exception
of adding some very slight equalization to the low-end frequencies to assist the dynamics
of the once state-of-the-art (but certainly vintage by today’s standards) array of electronics.

Our assembly follows picture sequence. Each CD represents one part of the picture, opening respectively with the “Main Title” and closing with the
“End Credits,” as did both parts of the show. Each disc, therefore,
can be played separately (and satisfyingly), though there
is additional satisfaction in listening to both discs as a whole.
There are four cues that technically qualify as “source” pieces,
but we elected to include them in sequence rather than
relegating them as “extras.” One introduces the crucial circus
material and, as such, feels welcome in the score. (Since it
was composed for source purposes, no ending to the cue
was recorded. We have simply added a “board fade” to musically
exit the cue.) Two of the other pieces (“Bedroom Jazz
Source” and “Guillory’s Muzak”) are lazy, smoke-tinged jazz
numbers that, besides offering musical contrast, are terrific
numbers unto themselves. The final source cue (“Richie’s Talk Show Play-Off”) is a brief quasijazz
number that seemed a tad lonely when left as the solitary extra at the end of the entire
album—so it’s included where the composer intended. (Tiny Footnote: For those who enjoy the
“Cue Assembly” details, please note the term “Edit” in brackets does not indicate a deletion of
any music but simply identifies cues where large gaps of silence within the cue (intended purely
for lines of dialog) were recorded “live” during the actual sessions and have been removed for
listening purposes.)

Bellis writes with attention to the introduction of motifs and tiny ideas, how they will work
within the greater score and what his overall musical arc will be. This allows several smaller
cues to be joined musically to create larger ones, while retaining the overall architecture of the
score as a whole. As a result, when listening to this score in sequence—even with the inclusion
of brief cues spread out over nearly 100 minutes—the listener will find a certain weight to the
total experience. Starting in a gentle Americana mode, the music takes the listener on a long
journey “out there,” explores something evil, becomes scared, engages in a powerful life-ordeath
battle and finally brings everyone back home.